Project Dune Developer's Blog

Sunday, 2 September 2007

We upgraded our community site and have recently completed work on transferring the content from the webserver to the wiki. Please see our new wiki infrastructure.

We've also added friendly forums for use by the project, where you can discuss issues on the software, request features and so on. The forums also allow you to discuss the topics of quality in general with other professionals.

The scope of the project is slightly changing. It started out as a piece of software, but I think it would be interesting to make the project also a collector of information and host a large repository of consolidated knowledge on the topic of software quality.

Saturday, 25 August 2007

The last release was accompanied by a request for help and interest from the community. I got quite a number of replies and I've added quite a few developers to the project. There are now 14 members in total and we have testers, programmers and consultants or mentors.

The efforts will be spread among multiple modules and also in the area of understanding the project and improving the main issue management module.

Wednesday, 15 August 2007

Some comments came in after the last release. As I don't have Windows on any system here, the script failed for a number of new modules that were added. I have now used a virtual machine to verify the install scripts and things should be fine now.

Other enhancements to this release are XSS-attacks (there were 3 actual holes in reality, the others were not any issue), caching which is related to the latest 1.4 RC1 release and how GWT things were changed, a new report for timesheets and a couple of bugfixes overall.

Sunday, 12 August 2007

I had to forcefully make some time free to get all the features and some bugs implemented to make the next release. This 1.3.0 release is quite a bit of a landmark release. The layout and color scheme should be much better and consistent.

Timesheet and Scrum task management have had a couple of updates and improvements to them. Someone at some point in time also requested an administration module so that it wasn't longer necessary to update everything directly through the database. This is also added now, but it will have to get more features and improvements in the future.

I spent a good deal to improve the inspections. Binary files didn't work. The inspection module has also been separated from the Dune core part. This allows people for example to customize things easier and allow for inspections without CR (Dune) integration (and a bit of work).

See the release notes for full information of the CR's resolved in this release:

The DuneWrite module is still ongoing, but I focused on ironing out wrinkles on existing parts first. Now that this is out of the way and I seem to be getting some more time now, I think it's time to look at other things in the project. I have a holiday coming up, about a month, so you could expect a couple of more releases and updates then.

Saturday, 19 May 2007

I've just released version 1.2.4 of Project Dune. This contains some bug fixes and an alpha version of the timesheet module.

The timesheet module allows you to keep track of time spent per day and report on the time spent in the reports. This is very useful if you are using Project Dune as a consultant. Note that we're looking how this can provide even better information using for example a link to financial systems (allocating an hourly rate to each identified hour).

Tuesday, 1 May 2007

I've just made a new release of Project Dune. It has a couple of bug fixes in there, but the main change was the way how we manage and generate the schema.

There are now schema creation scripts available for other databases like Oracle, DB2, MSSQL and so on, but we have not tested compatibility or proper functioning with those databases as I don't have access to those types of servers here.

The changes to the schema are necessary in order to make the project more flexible. I've been struggling to synchronize the SQL data with the SQL schema with the actual object model and the declarations. There were four points where things could easily go wrong besides the maintenance required on the actual database schema's.

The project now generates the schema automatically and this helps significantly. We're using hibernate annotations with Hibernate tools to make this job easier.

This release puts the project on track for future add-ons, like the timesheet, the document management module and less time lost on those boring synchronization steps. Hope you like the release and don't forget to look at the UPGRADING file before you start!